Book Reviews: From political histories to bad comics, to bad comics of political histories. And the occasional rant about fiction and writing.

Mimsy Review: Liberal Fascism

Reviewed by Jerry Stratton, February 25, 2015

“The relevance of the past is that unlike the conservative who has wrestled with his history to make sure he does not repeat it, liberals see no need to do anything of the sort. And so, armed with complete confidence in their own good intentions, they happily go marching past boundaries we should stay well clear of.”

Around the net

The story of how the National Socialist German Workers Party and the fascist government takeover of businesses became defined as a conservative movement by socialists and leftists who believe the government should control businesses.

That Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration/Blue Eagle program looked fascist wasn’t lost on the Roosevelt administration—or on fascists.

My friends on the left who post on Facebook asking that we import Christian values into government policy would be right at home among the fascists in Italy and Germany, according to Jonah Goldberg. Fascism is, among other things, supplanting religion with government, a “religion of the state”. This is similar to the definition used by early progressives who talked of the “social gospel”.

Progressives like to tout Christian values at the point of a gun for things that sound nice, like forced charity. The first time I ran across this, I thought it was because they hadn’t thought the implications through. But if progressivism is “applied Christianity”, as early progressive William Gladden described it, perhaps they have thought it through and enjoy the thought of aligning religion with the government.

Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is the story of how the National Socialist German Workers Party and the fascist government takeover of businesses became defined as a conservative movement by socialists, progressives, and leftists who believe governments should control businesses.

Several years ago at a library book sale I stumbled across an old book of interviews by the progressive Chicago Daily News. The interviewer, Edward Price Bell, “Dean of the Foreign Staff of the Chicago Daily News”, openly praised Mussolini. At the time I found it a humorous example of the media getting things very wrong in their quest to suck up to power.

They call him dictator. To the unpatriotic, to the anti-social and anti-civilized, to the lawless, to the bolshevists, he is dictator. To Italy—full of sterling human worth—to Italy, in my judgement, Mussolini is liberator. — Edward Price Bell (1925. “Italy’s Rebirth”)

But according to Goldberg, this was not isolated praise. Progressives loved fascism as a more active form of socialism, and before World War II the connection between fascism, socialism, and progressivism was considered normal by each of those three groups. Fascists were members of socialist groups. They continued to call themselves socialists after leaving those groups. Prominent socialists continued to call fascists socialists, and prominent progressives continued to call fascists progressive. The three groups studied the same philosophies, including Marx.

To put a nice spin on it, this book describes pre-war progressives knowingly emulating fascism, and praising fascists for being progressive men of action. After the war progressives continued promoting those ideas but refused to identify them with fascism, instead using the term as a catch-all for ideas and people they disagreed with. The result is that today’s progressives—nearly the entirety of the influential left—continue to use fascist methods and pursue fascist paths but without any sense of history to tell them where these methods lead and what awaits them at the end of their journey.

Many of the things that the left call “fascist” are almost 180 degrees away from it; school choice, for example, “is arguably the most un-fascist public policy ever conceived, after homeschooling”. Fascists understood that their control over people’s minds worked best when started as young as possible. Taking education away from the parents supports this.

Fascism is another of the utopian ideas of that time that seek to throw off the shackles of the bourgeoisie.

The American fascist tradition is deeply bound up with the effort to “Europeanize” America and give it a “modern” state that can be harnessed to utopian ends.

It seeks to remake society along militaristic lines, not by glorifying the military but by turning civilian organizations into little armies: the Peace Corps, Americorps, and turning every public policy into a “war on… drugs, poverty, etc.”

Progressives enjoy the emergency powers government gains during a war, and after both World War I and World War II tried to convince Americans to retain a war mindset in order to maintain those powers.

It is important to remember what “totalitarianism” actually meant. It wasn’t a term applied to fascism by its enemies, but by its practitioners. It meant that the state is everything:

Mussolini coined the word “totalitarianism” to describe not a tyrannical society but a humane one in which everyone is taken care of and contributes equally. It was an organic concept where every class, every individual, was part of the larger whole.

Today, we might talk about how “it takes a village”, and Goldberg devotes an entire chapter to Clinton-era progressive politics. “As adults we have to start thinking and believing that there isn’t really any such thing as someone else’s child…” said Hillary Clinton in 1996, and in It Takes a Village,

“I cannot say enough in support of home visits,” she gushes. “[The] village needs a town crier and a town prodder.” Again, scrape the saccharine from the sentiment and look underneath. Imagine if, say, the former attorney general John Ashcroft had said, “I cannot say enough in support of home visits.” The shrieks of “fascism” would be deafening.

Now, it’s important to remember that he is not calling Clinton—or any modern leftist—fascist. His point is that their ideas are rooted in the thinking of pre-war leftists who called themselves fascist and adopted fascism as a valid movement. Among the paragons of the pre-war left who endorsed fascism are, according to Goldberg, The New Republic (which called it “an amazing experiment… in reconciling individualism and socialism, politics and technology”, Jules Verne (who originated the term liberal fascism), and George Bernard Shaw (who “at one time or another… idolized Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini as the world’s great ‘progressive’ leaders because they ‘did things,’ unlike the leaders of those ‘putrefying corpses’ called parliamentary democracies”).

“It was also around this time that through a dexterous sleight of hand, Progressivism came to be renamed “liberalism.” In the past, liberalism had referred to political and economic liberty as understood by enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith. For them, the ultimate desideratum was maximal individual freedom under the benign protection of a minimalist state. The progressives, led by Dewey, subtly changed the meaning of this term, importing the Prussian vision of liberalism as the alleviation of material and educational poverty, and liberation from old dogmas and old facts. For progressives liberty no longer meant freedom from tyranny, but freedom from want, freedom to be a “constructive” citizen, the Rousseauian and Hegelian “freedom” of living in accord with the state and the general will. Classical liberals were now routinely called conservatives, while devotees of social control were dubbed liberals.”

As Wilson put it, the essence of Progressivism was that the individual “marry his interests to the state.”

Goldberg has no kind words for Senator Joe McCarthy, but,

… nothing that happened under the mad reign of Joe McCarthy remotely compares with what Wilson and his fellow progressives foisted on America.

Wilson, after all, signed the sedition act of 1918 and wanted to extend it into peacetime. McCarthy didn’t have the benefit of the sedition act, nor did he have a citizens league to spy on Americans.

The Justice Department created its own quasi-official fascisti, known as the American Protective League, or APL. They were given badges—many of which read “Secret Service”—and charged with keeping an eye on their neighbors, dockworkers, and friends. Used as private eyes by overzealous prosecutors in thousands of cases, they were furnished with ample government resources. The APL had an intelligence division, in which members were bound by oath not to reveal they were secret policemen. Members of the APL read their neighbors’ mail and listened in on their phones with government approval.

And Wilson’s administration didn’t just spy on what people were thinking, they also tried to plant pro-Wilson thoughts. In scenes reminiscent of the Nazi youth speechifying in the movie Cabaret, Wilson’s Committee on Public Information trained…

…an army of nearly a hundred thousand “Four Minute Men.” Each was equipped and trained by the CPI to deliver a four minute speech at town meetings, in restaurants, in theaters—anyplace they could get an audience—to spread the word that the “very future of democracy” was at stake… These speeches celebrated Wilson as a larger-than-life leader and the Germans as less-than-human huns.

To Goldberg, Franklin Roosevelt, who served in Wilson’s presidency as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was the inheritor of Wilson’s legacy.

The British ambassador cabled London to alert his superiors to the spreading hysteria fomented by the nation’s new leader. The “starved loyalties and repressed hero-worship of the country have found in him an outlet and a symbol.” Visiting the rural hinterlands, an aide reported back on the brewing cult of personality: “Every house I visited—mill worker or unemployed—had a picture of the President… He is at once God and their intimate friend; he knows them all by name, knows their little town and mill, their little lives and problems. And though everything else fails, he is there, and will not let them down.”

Though the crisis was economic in nature, the new national commander had promised to seek the “power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe… I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.”

Perhaps the most fascist symbol of the FDR administration was the Blue Eagle program. Businesses were encouraged to fly the Blue Eagle as a sign that they were voluntarily complying with some serious government restrictions; Americans were encouraged to shop only at the Blue Eagle.

[It] was often compared to the swastika or the German Reich eagle in both American and German newspapers. Johnson1 demanded that compliance with the Blue Eagle program be monitored by an army of quasi-official informations, from union members to Boy Scouts. His totalitarian approach was unmistakable. “When every American housewife understands that the Blue Eagle on everything that she permits to come into her home is a symbol of its restoration to security, may God have mercy on the man or group of men who attempt to trifle with this bird.”

Johnson’s favorite means of promoting compliance with the Blue Eagle were military parades and Nuremberg-style rallies… A hundred thousand school kids were marched onto the Boston Common and forced to swear an oath, administered by the mayor: “I promise as a good American citizen to do my part for the NRA. I will buy only where the Blue Eagle flies.”

Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration had no problem saying that America under Roosevelt was evolving toward fascism:

The Research and Planning Division of the NRA commissioned a study, Capitalism and Labor Under Fascism, which concluded, “The fascist principles are very similar to those which have been evolving in America and so are of a particular interest at this time.”

It’s ironic that in the 1930s it was far from out-of-bounds to call the New Deal or FDR fascist. Yet for the two generations after World War II it was simply unacceptable to associate the New Deal with fascism in any way.

This was possible because previous to the war “right-winger” meant anyone who opposed FDR, including left-leaning New Republic columnist J. T. Flynn who “denounced Roosevelt for moving in what he considered a rightward direction.”

Likewise Father Coughlin is still considered right-wing on the left, despite supporting FDR until FDR refused to move left enough for Coughlin. Coughlin’s platform—for his National Union for Social Justice—included the following:

a just and living annual wage

nationalizing those public necessities which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals

controlling [private property] for the public good

the right to organize in unions but also in the duty of the Government… to protect those organizations

Like asking us to believe that a National Socialist Workers Party has nothing to do with socialism, they also ask us to believe that a National Union for Social Justice is right-wing.

Goldberg isn’t the only person who considers FDR’s policies fascist:

“There is at least one official voice in Europe that expresses understanding of the method and motives of President Roosevelt, began a New York Times report in July 19332. “This voice is that of Germany, as represented by Chancellor Adolf Hitler.” The German leader told the Times, “I have sympathy with President Roosevelt because he marches straight toward his objectives over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.”

“I’m not saying that people who once called themselves progressives were racist and therefore those who call themselves progressives today are racist, too. Rather, the point is that the edifice of contemporary liberalism stands on a foundation of assumptions and ideals integral to the larger fascist moment. Contemporary liberals, who may be the kindest and most racially tolerant people in the world, nonetheless choose to live in a house of distinctly fascist architecture. Liberal ignorance of the fact renders the fascist foundation neither intangible nor irrelevant. Rather, it underscores the success of these ideas, precisely because they go unquestioned.”

No discussion of liberal fascism could be complete without Margaret Sanger, founder of perhaps the most progressive organization in daily life, Planned Parenthood, and founded in the spirit of the eugenics movement. Sanger is still “today considered a liberal saint, a founder of modern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the progressive pantheon… Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards…&nbsp;Recipients are a Who’s Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC’s West Wing.”

Sanger was, according to Goldberg, a racist and a eugenicist, who “sought to ban reproduction of the unfit and regulate reproduction for everybody else.”

A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger’s books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugenics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. As editor of the Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racism we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, the Birth Control Review ran articles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler.

In 1939 Sanger created the previously mentioned “Negro Project” which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers, doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The project’s racist intent is beyond doubt. “The mass of significant Negroes,” read the project’s report, “still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase in Negroes…&nbsp;is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.”

For progressives, such as Sidney Webb, the minimum wage was less a part of their social justice movement than a part of their eugenics movement—“establishing a minimum wage above the value of the unemployable’s worth would lock them out of the market, accelerating their elimination as a class.”

Liberal Fascism is an important memoir of pre-war fascism. It is difficult, looking back on the pre-war world, to understand how fascism could succeed when it is so clearly everything that is wrong today. The answer is that back then fascism wasn’t seen as a bad thing by the progressive movement. However, his book has some weaknesses. He makes a lot throughout the book out of politicians promising to “transcend old categories of left and right” as indicative of fascism. But this isn’t surprising from any politician—if you want to get votes from the other party, you have to claim to be above partisanship.

In his defense, he occasionally—not always—adds a qualifier, for example,

… a new ‘post-partisan’ spirit that places the important decisions in the hands of experts and intellectual superman…

But this is lacking more often than not, and I honestly don’t know whether this applies to all “third way” or “middle way” politics.

His quotes tend to be abbreviated: you’re going to have to followup on the voluminous footnotes to get the full sense of what was said. And in some cases, footnotes are seriously lacking. For example,

FDR witnessed, approved, and, on occasion, participated in all of the excesses of World War I. There’s no record anywhere that he disapproved of George Creel’s propaganda ministry or that he had any larger misgivings about the war abroad or at home. He watched as Creel’s acolytes actively promoted what they dubbed “the Wilson cult.” He approved of the oppression of dissidents and heartily celebrated the passage of the Sedition and Espionage acts.

There are no quotes here from Roosevelt and no footnotes explaining how Goldberg knows this. The book is heavily footnoted, but still some things are stated that would better be shown.

As a book for people who tend toward the conservatism and classical liberalism, this is a great history. But it will probably not convince anyone else. That said, convincing the left wasn’t his purpose in writing it. His purpose was to help conservatives what fascism was and why the left’s attempts to tar conservatism and even classical liberalism with the label fascist is both dishonest and dangerous. If that’s what you’re looking for, you won’t be disappointed.

Hugh Johnson, head of the Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration.

This is the musical that beat the crap out of “The Godfather” in 1972. The music takes place on the stage of the Kit Kat Klub, where MC Joel Grey reigns over a motley collection of strippers, transvestites, vaudeville acts, and, of course, Liza Minelli. Grey, Minelli, and director Bob Fosse made a great movie about the twilight beauty of Germany’s nightclub decade. “Mi cabaret, au cabaret, tu cabaret!”

“Auschwitz requires more context than just Hitler. It requires that we understand why so many countries and so many world leaders enabled him. And it is not a difficult thing to understand. All we need to do is look at the response to Muslim attempts to kill Jews before and after the Holocaust.”

The story of how the National Socialist German Workers Party and the fascist government takeover of businesses became defined as a conservative movement by socialists and leftists who believe the government should control businesses.

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Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions. — Thomas Paine (Common Sense)